MSU tennis teams ready for tournament play

BOZEMAN, Mont. - The regular season for college tennis came to a close this past weekend, and now post-season play will begin with the Big Sky Championship Tournament starting up this week.

The MSU men's tennis team finished the regular season as co-conference champions after posting a 9-1 conference record. The Bobcats will now sit back and wait to see who they will face in the tournament after receiving a first round bye.

After missing the conference tournament last year the Bobcats say it feels good to be going to the tournament this year.

"Overall it was an incredible regular season hopefully it keeps going in the big sky tourney" said head coach Jared Burnham.

"We just need to keep doing what were doing, one thing we've been doing really well is cheering for each other and believing in each other and just keeping the energy up, if we do that I really think we have a shot at the title" said Bobcat junior Kenny Dodd.

"We've all been working pretty hard on the practice court and making improvements so I think it helps as well so I'm pretty sure we will compete pretty well at the tournament, hopefully bring it home which would be good" said Bobcat freshman Harry James.

The men were not the only ones to earn a post-season birth either, the MSU women will also be heading to Sacramento to play in the Big Sky Conference Tournament.

Montana State's women's tennis team secured a playoff berth over the past weekend with a 4-0 win over Idaho State.

The Bobcat women enter the six-team Big Sky Tournament as the sixth seed, and they will faces NAU on Friday.

The Bobcat women also say they're happy to be going to the tournament and even though they are the sixth seed, they hope to make some noise.

"That's a great accomplishment I think, even if it wasn't necessarily as high as we wanted there's a lot of teams that don't have the opportunity to continue playing, so that's something really special, and to have the men's team there makes it even better" said Bobcat junior Ellie Crum.

"I think all of us are very excited about playing another match because we haven't played as well as we wanted to so we can kind of prove now that we are better than we've shown the whole season" said Bobcat Senior Charlotta Hjalmarsson.

This will be the 2nd meeting between Montana State and NAU, in the first meeting it was the Lumberjacks who were victorious in the match.